BANNERS

WHAT ARE BANNERS?

Are graphics or images used for advertising on the Internet, that you can find almost on every site that you visit, at the top or the bottom of the pages. They have an advertising message, and very frequently come with animated images. Their intention is to capture your attention with their blinking animations and bright colors.

But after a while, you will start identifying them with ads, and stop paying them attention.

Let me ask you a straight question: Do you click over banners very often? I bet your answer is NO, because as a matter of fact the average click through ratio for banner ads ads is nowadays around 0.3%, what means that on a run of a thousand banners you can expect to have only 3 visitors to your site.

Today's click through ratio is a tenth of what it was in 1997, so there are two questions that will probably come to your mind

Should you use them?
What's the best way of using them?

The answer depends on how much profit can you make from each visitor to your site...

IF YOU CAN CREATE SIGNIFICANT PROFIT FROM EACH OF YOUR SITE'S VISITOR...

Then you can consider banner ads as one of your promotion means

Start out small, and test the effectiveness of your banners with small campaigns
If it shows to be profitable, then go to big banner advertising.

Banners are a good promotion method for sites with high profit/visitor ratio.

IF YOU CAN'T CREATE SIGNIFICANT PROFIT...

If your site is a personal web site, an affiliate program site, or you are planning to sell advertising space... Forget banners!.

HOW CAN YOU INCREASE BANNERS CLICK THROUGH RATIO?

A banner isn't good just because it has a fancy graphic

Your banner's purpose is not to look cute, it's to get people to click on it.

Once they click they arrive to your site, and there you can show them all you that you have to offer.

An ugly banner that brings people to your site, it's better than a pretty one that doesn't!

Include the words "click here" in your banners

Why? Because banners that contain the words "click here" get more clicks than those that don't.

You must be aware that thousands of new users arrive Internet every month, people that have never "surfed the net" and just don't know what to do. And if you don't tell them "Click here" they just don't know that they are supposed to do it, in order to know more about your offer.

Animated banners are better than static ones

Banners that blink or move, sometimes can be an annoying thing, but catches the eye better than an ad that is completely static, and to catch attention is exactly what you are looking for.

The downside of the animation is that it will increase the file size of your banners, and make them take a longer time to load. If your files are too big, and take too much time to load, that will increase the chance that your visitor has already scrolled past your banner, before it even appears on the screen.

Make sure that your text states clearly what you are about

Using pictures or your company logo could be a very good idea if people already knows about you, but if they don't... make sure that there's enough room left for text.

Use a large font size

You'll have to get noticed and small text just doesn't stand out the way that bigger text does.

Get right to the point and be brief

Don't try to explain in detail what your site is about, you should explain it at your site. You must use banners just to get the click to your site.

Outline the benefits

To get the user's click you must give him a good reason to visit your site. Words such as "free" or a beautiful woman and a hint of sex usually attract more hits.

But your banners must talk about what you really offer. If there's nothing free at your site, you can't use the word free in your banner, or you'll get the wrong audience.

So be careful with the tricks,. they can be very useful, and can cause problems as well.

Better small

The faster your banner loads, the more time it has to attract a response. So you should always remember to optimize your banners for size reducing the number of bytes your banner takes is CRITICAL to increasing it's CTR. Ideally, your banner should be 6000 bytes or less:

It is often a good idea to remove excess graphics or heavy animation.

I recommend OptiView as the best online tool you can use to reduce the size (in bytes) of your banners (and other graphics). It will compress your graphics up to 90%.

Trick banners

Banners like the following, pull quite a lot better than the standard ones.

The reason is that this kind of banners doesn't really look like banners, and many people just think that they are part of the navigation system of the site and click it.

Trick banners receive a very high click through ratio when compared to normal banner ads, but their downside is that the traffic they bring can be of lower value, because visitors are tricked into coming to your site.

Target your audience

Try to place your banners on places that attract the type of people who might be interested about your site. The right audience is the one that will give you the higher clicker

BANNERS STANDARD SIZES

SIZE	TYPE
468 x 60	Full Banner
234 x 60	Half Banner
392 x 72	Full Banners with vertical navigation
120 X 240	Vertical Banner
125 x125	Square Button
120 x 90	Button # 1
120 x 60	Button # 2
88 x 31	Micro Button

BANNERS EXCHANGING

If you can't afford it or just don't like the idea of paying so much for an advertising campaign, you can opt for a banners exchange program, where you display banners on your pages for free and in return, other members of the program show your banner ad on their sites.

This sounds like a good idea, because it doesn't cost anything. But is it?

Most banner exchanges have a 2:1 ratio

So for every 2 banners shown on your site, your banner gets shown once on other sites, and there are programs with a 3:2 ratio

Many exchange programs don't offer targeting

So your banners will end being displayed on sites that have very little in common with your site and that leads to a low CTR for your banners.

Let's make some numbers

You join a 2:1 banners exchange program

You get 10000 new visitors a month to your site that will see other people's banner

You earn 5000 impressions a month. Your banner is shown in 5000 places

As you have created some killer banners, you beat the industry average click through rate of 0.3% and your banner receives a 1% Click Through Rate, so 50 visitors come to your site each month.

So you exchanged 10000 hardly earned visitors for 50 visitors to your site!

My advice: Forget about banners exchange programs. Only display a banner ad on your pages, if they pay you for doing it. And even though, make sure you earn more than you spent to bring the visitor into your web site..